Paolo Pareti - December 4, 2014 in Bibliographic, Events, linked data, tools
Paolo Pareti - December 4, 2014 in Bibliographic, Events, linked data, tools
Paolo Pareti - December 4, 2014 in Bibliographic, Events, linked data, tools
Paolo Pareti - December 4, 2014 in Bibliographic, Events, linked data, tools
Jonathan Gray - April 17, 2013 in Bibliographic, Featured, Free Culture, Open Content, Open GLAM, Open Humanities, Policy, Public Domain
Tomorrow is the official launch date for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).
If you’ve been following it, you’ll know that it has the long term aim of realising “a large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all”.
More specifically, Robert Darnton, Director of the Harvard University Library and one of the DPLA’s leading advocates to date, recently wrote in the New York Review of Books, that the DPLA aims to:
make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans—and eventually to everyone in the world—online and free of chargeWhat will this practically mean? How will the DPLA translate this broad mission into action? And to what extent will they be aligned with other initiatives to encourage cultural heritage institutions to open up their holdings, like our own OpenGLAM or Wikimedia’s GLAM-WIKI? Here are a few of our thoughts on what we hope the DPLA will become.
What is in the Public Domain needs to remain in the Public Domain. Exclusive control over Public Domain works cannot be re-established by claiming exclusive rights in technical reproductions of the works, or by using technical and or contractual measures to limit access to technical reproductions of such works. Works that are in the Public Domain in analogue form continue to be in the Public Domain once they have been digitised. The lawful user of a digital copy of a Public Domain work should be free to (re-) use, copy and modify the work. Public Domain status of a work guarantees the right to re-use, modify and make reproductions and this must not be limited through technical and or contractual measures. When a work has entered the Public Domain there is no longer a legal basis to impose restrictions on the use of that work.The DPLA could create their own principles or recommendations for the digital publication of public domain works (perhaps recommending legal tools like the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark) as well as ensuring that new content that they digitise is explicitly marked as open. Speaking at our OpenGLAM US launch last month, Emily Gore, the DPLA’s Director for Content, said that this is definitely something that they’d be thinking about over the coming months. We hope they adopt a strong and principled position in favour of openness, and help to raise awareness amongst institutions and the general public about the importance of a digital public domain which is open for everyone.
Primavera De Filippi - January 21, 2013 in Bibliographic, COMMUNIA, OKF France, Public Domain
Last week the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) concluded two new agreements with private companies to digitze over 70.000 old books, 200.000 sound recordings and other documents belonging (either partially or as a whole) to the public domain. While these public private partnerships enable the digitization of these works they also contain 10-year exclusive agreements allowing the private companies carrying out the digitization to commercialize the digitized documents. During this period only a limited number of these works may be offered online by the BnF.
Together with La Quadrature du Net, Framasoft, SavoirsCom1 and the Open Knowledge Foundation France, COMMUNIA has issued a statement (in french) to express our profound disagreement with the terms of these partnerships that restrict digital access to an important part of Europe’s cultural heritage. The agreements that the BnF has entered into, effectively take the works being digitized out of the public domain for the next 10 years.
The value of the public domain lies in the free dissemination of knowledge and the ability for everyone to access and create new works based on previous works. Yet, instead of taking advantage of the opportunities offered by digitization, the exclusivity of these agreements will force public bodies, such as research institutions or university libraries, to purchase digital content that belongs to the common cultural heritage.
As such, these partnerships constitute a commodification of the public domain by contractual means. COMMUNIA, of which the OKFN is a partner, has been critical of such arrangements from the start (see their Public Domain Manifesto) and Policy Reccomendations 4 & 5. More interestingly these agreements are also in direct contradiction with the Public Domain Charter published by the Europeana Foundation in 2011. In this context it is interesting to note that the director of Bibliothèque nationale de France currently serves as the chairman of the Europeana Foundation’s Executive Board.
Jonathan Gray - January 14, 2013 in Access to Information, Bibliographic, Campaigning, Featured, News, Open Access, Open Data, Open Government Data, Policy
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.In 2010 he founded Demand Progress, which helped to mobilise over a million people in response to proposed legislation like the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). In 2011 he again hit the headlines when he was arrested for downloading roughly 4 million subscription-only academic articles from JSTOR by placing a laptop in a computer cupboard at MIT and using this to gain unauthorised access to the JSTOR service. The prosecution alleged that he intended to make these articles freely available on the web. Last September the US Federal Government raised the felony count from four to thirteen, which meant that Aaron was potentially facing a total of 50+ years and a fine in the area of $4 million for his actions. His family suggested that the case was a factor in his death – and blamed the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office for “intimidation and prosecutorial overreach” and MIT for “refus[ing] to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles”. The president of MIT has just announced that he has ordered an investigation into their role in Aaron’s prosecution. As Peter Eckersley from the Electronic Frontier Foundation commented on Saturday:
While his methods were provocative, the goal that Aaron died fighting for — freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it — is one that we should all support.While Aaron was deeply involved in all kinds of technical, scholarly and organising activities to promote an open digital commons and an open internet – from helping to develop RSS 1.0 and Markdown, to early sketches of the semantic web with some of its pioneers and work on the first technical implementations of the Creative Commons licenses – he also never lost sight of the bigger picture, of what it was all for. He was a talented coder and knew how to take a principled stance, but he was never one to get lost in detail or dogma. From his writings about how data-driven transparency initiatives are not enough to effect change in themselves, to his guide to developing software that addresses real needs, he was always aware of the fact that using the information, technology and the internet to change the world is not easy, and requires graft, skill, scrutiny, critical reflection and taking risks. Aaron’s passing is a tremendously sad and significant loss. Long live his legacy.
Kenny Whitebloom - November 6, 2012 in Bibliographic, External, Open Content, Open Data, Open GLAM
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is an ambitious project to build a national digital library platform for the United States that will make the cultural and scientific record available, free to all Americans. Hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, the DPLA is an international community of over 1,200 volunteers and participants from public and research libraries, academia, all levels of government, publishing, cultural organizations, the creative community, and private industry devoted to building a free, open, and growing national resource.
Here’s an outline of some of the key developments in the DPLA planning initiative. For more information on the Digital Public Library of America, including ways in which you can participate, please visit http://dp.la.
Velichka Dimitrova - September 17, 2012 in Bibliographic, Events, Featured, metadata, Open Economics, Our Work, WG Economics, Workshop
supported by
Naomi Lillie - September 14, 2012 in Bibliographic, Events, Join us, linked-open-data, Meetups, OKF, OKScotland, Open Data, Open GLAM, Open Government Data
OKFN Meet-ups are friendly and informal evenings for people to get together to share and debate all areas of openness. Depending on the number of people on a given evening, we have presentations and/or round-table discussions about Open Knowledge and Open Data – from politics and philosophy to the practicalities of theory and practice. We have had two previous events (see here for the ‘launch’ write-up and here for the invitation to the second instalment); this time we were kindly hosted by the Informatics Forum, and the weather stayed fine enough to explore the roof terrace (complete with vegetable garden, gizmos to record wind-speed and weather, a view across the city to Arthur’s Seat and even a blue moon).
Around 20 of us gathered together and presentations were given by the following people:
Planet Open Knowledge